The Power of Words (Full Contents of AW April 2012 Magazine)

The Armenian Weekly Magazine
April 2012

Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Over the years, the April magazine issue of the Armenian Weekly has provided extensive space to the topic of choosing the right words and adopting the proper discourse—a challenge that seems to pervade much of the writing on minorities, gender, human rights violations, and genocide.

The magazine you hold in your hands (or are reading on your computer/smartphone screen) tackles this challenge head on. For example, Theriault examines “the commitment to denial,” nondenial, and the space in between, and points out how denialism conceals truth in a “multiplicitous ambiguity,” where “all discussions of mass violence in the present [become] mutual military conflict, and in the past mutual rhetorical conflict.” Mamigonian looks at how “[i]nstead of confronting the genocide head-on, deniers play upon widespread ignorance of the subject and seek to create doubt,” which is then propagated by lazy journalism. Gursel, in turn, explores problematic discourses by looking at representations of the Armenian Diaspora in Turkish newspapers, tearing apart disease, psychological illness, and rape analogies.

In 2011–12, novels, plays, and films approaching the Armenian Genocide from different vantage points have been or will be released. We have asked a playwright, a novelist, and a filmmaker to tell the story of how their work took shape. The power of their words and the themes they explore echo the issues raised above.

And finally, a third section in the magazine examines perceptions of and discourse on Armenians—as genocide victims, as refugees, and as citizens in an unrepentant perpetrator state–in the early- and mid-20th century, and how those perceptions resonate today.

Below are the full contents of the magazine.

ARTS AND LITERATURE

Taboos, Tattoos, and Trauma: Making ‘Grandma’s Tattoos’
—By Suzanne Khardalian

The Seed that Finally Took Root: The Kernel that Led to ‘The Sandcastle Girls’
—By Chris Bohjalian

The Making of ‘Deported/a dream play’
—By Joyce Van Dyke

PERSPECTIVES

Turkey Has Acknowledged the Armenian Genocide
—By Uğur Ümit Üngör

Post-Denial Denial
—By Henry C. Theriault

Tlön, Turkey, and the Armenian Genocide
—By Marc Mamigonian

Kings of Spades: Fantasies of Sovereignty in a Pathology Plot
—By Burcu Gursel

A Tale of Two Monuments:
An Extremely Belated Anatomy of Two Radically Understudied Makings and One Unmaking
—By Ayda Erbal

Does the French Law Penalizing Genocide Denial Restrict Free Speech?
—By Harut Sassounian

FOR THE RECORD

Virtuous Victims: Imagining Armenians in the West
—By Matthias Bjørnlund

Armenian Representation in Turkey?
—By Talin Suciyan

Syrian-Armenian Memory and the Refugee Issue in Syria under the French Mandate (1921–46)
—By Seda Altuğ

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Dr. Khatchig Mouradian

Khatchig Mouradian is the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress and a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Studies, New York University. Mouradian is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918, published in 2021. The book has received the Syrian Studies Association “Honourable Mention 2021.” In 2020, Mouradian was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review.